Normalized legal drafting and the Query method (Allen, 1978)

1978 paper by Layman E. Allen: Normalized legal drafting and the Query method.

Precursor to rules as code, computational contracts etc. “Normalized” legal document à la Allen ≈ Controlled Natural Language# with the goal “Improve communication among humans”.

Purpose

Aims to fix unintended syntactic ambiguity, imprecision, confusing turn of phrase or just plain incorrect meaning. (There are also Advantages of imprecision#, which this method would keep.)

Normalization

(Manually) convert text into two equivalent formats:

  1. Itemized list, using line breaks and explicit tokens such as 1. and a)

  2. Human-readable visual diagram. For istance, if a then b is expressed as

    >─┐
  a
  │
  ˅
  b

Advantages:

  • Exposes ambiguity and imprecision, when you need to put things in parallel and be explicit about what is left unsaid.
  • Visual graph shows more clearly different ways of reaching a state, etc.

Query method

Method for humans to learn to draft in the normalized style.

TODO: read that part of paper.

logo